GOD'S RAGGED ARMY

The car rose slowly from the fetid plains. For days, in tormented dreams, he had been a soldier going around a battlefield, killing the wounded. Shot after shot after shot in those terrible scenes. Mostly the victims were already dead; and his bullets thudded into corpses beginning to rot in that terrible heat. Some, he knew, were playacting death, hoping against hope that they would be overlooked. Sometimes they begged for mercy, a final futile plea for life. Sometimes, their consciousness already slipping, they moaned as the bullets thudded into their flesh. Mostly, he was just firing bullets into corpses. He felt no regret.

In a different realm, he finally escaped the corner of suburbia into which he had been hunted.

The surveillance had been brutal, invasive, offensive, had repeatedly made him homeless, and the ordered houses which surrounded him as he finished Hideout in the Apocalypse might have been a comfort to some, but were of no comfort to him. He could hear the orchestrated derision. He was meant to suffer, cringe, withdraw. They hoped, more than anything, he would kill himself and save themselves the trouble.

He had made the same mistake before, assuming that somewhere in government run agencies there was reason, intelligence, compassion, that the treatment dished out to him had somehow been a mistake of the lower orders.

We seen in others what we see in ourselves.

Old Alex would not make the mistake again.

He remained continually astonished at just how bad Australian governance was, just how dishonest, incompetent and corrupt were the security agencies who hunted him, just how bleakly totalitarian, how utterly ignorant, had become the country he had once so loved.

Hunted back to the home of an elderly relative, he finished the book against all odds, in difficult circumstances, draped as the backdrop of his thoughts were with the carping hatred of the pig ignorant police and government agents who circled him, hoping to destroy.

They forgot: he heard everything, and he knew just how malicious they were.

The shifting personnel of the Watchers on the Watch contained few of any integrity; and he had become a zoo exhibit, someone to poke fun at, or simply to torment.

"They were selling tickets," one of the supervisors called in to clean up the mess would later say.

It was an instinct to hide, to pretend to be someone other than who he was. No one could act more stupid or unassuming than he could, if the situation required. But even in this latest circumstance, it was as if he had run down a rabbit hole, and they had continued to poke their sticks, the cruelty of mob behaviour, as they poked and poked and poked.

The government ran anti-bullying campaigns, but were the biggest bullies of all.

They forget: he learnt more about them than they would ever learn from him.

The car rose from the plains, and after visiting Glen, whose perverted duplicities, multiple treacheries and flagrant dishonesties were flowering into new extremes, he spent two nights in the stone house where he had been two months before, in the midst of that terrible winter during which he wrote Hideout in the Apocalypse.

This time there was a different, more powerful kind of wrath.

A Terradactyl swept high across the mountains, In his dreams it resembled more a giant sting-ray, except it was high high in the sky. He could see the suburban houses far below, and the seaweed thoughts of the denizens rising in little huddles. He no longer tried to listen. After months of persecution and harassment, which planet does he think he's from this time, he had lost all interest and all faith in the species. Whatever hope there may once have been, their tedious preoccupations were no longer of interest. There was a reason why the ancient Gods had been so cruel, their warriors so merciless. That was the nature of the species, blunt, disinterested, barbaric. He had once thought, with all the naivety of a new born, that people were mostly well intentioned. He knew better now..

Once his flying dreams had been a source of wonder and delight. Now he flew high and fierce, with piercing eye, and the cruelty that had been displayed towards him, the ceaseless bullying and harassment he had been subjected to by state agencies, all the attempts to silence a journalist, were folding out in the provisions of an ancient curse.

He knew more than he let on.

His enemies circled ever more frantically.

"Let's spell it out in Simple Language. We Will Kill You."

And then, out there in the desert where his mind could roam free, there was a shift in puzzling emphasis.

He performed the ultimate of modern insults, and unfriended Glen on Facebook, For his efforts he got sworn at, and Glen demanded to know why he had been wiped when he had been helping him with an ethical dilemma.

Glen could have been a friend, could have helped him with the abusive, unwarranted, unfair and invasive surveillance he had been enduring for so long.

Instead he had chosen to join the conga line of clever dicks; and further his own career.

The talk of an ethical dilemma was just another piece of vaulting gestalt about face, another lie among so many lies.

The only ethical dilemma was why the government agencies were so profoundly dishonest, why no one spoke up, why the supreme power of surveillance the modern technologies had gifted the very worst characters in the nation's secretive security agencies were not being properly monitored.

Why a government which was meant to serve the people, had instead become their enemy.

And why those who had so utterly mismanaged his case, and who had clearly wasted considerable government funds to hunt him and to try and intimidate a journalist, could still hold their jobs.

It was a good sign.

He was no longer participating in his own persecution.

Out there in the desert nights, with the stars feeding far above.


THE BIGGER STORY:

Tens of thousands of Cubans greeted Fidel Castro's funeral cortege on its journey across Cuba on Thursday, unflagging in their admiration for one of the towering figures of the 20th Century who is equally loathed by his adversaries.
Waving flags and singing the national anthem, Cubans thickly lined pastel-colored colonial streets to pay their respects to Castro. He died on Friday at age 90, a decade after stepping down as president but defiant to the end toward the United States, the world power he tormented from just 90 miles (145 km) away.
The government declared nine days of mourning for the man who built a Communist state, aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union and survived what his government claimed were more than 600 U.S. assassination attempts.

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